The danger facing the agency today is irrelevance to national security. In 2003, when the American military in Iraq found that its greatest threat was not from tanks and missiles but from roadside bombs, the Pentagon did not, as it once did, turn to DARPA, an agency stacked with top-notch technical personnel and decades of experience in bomb detection. Instead, it created an entirely new organization that was largely bereft of the type of science and technology expertise long resident in DARPA. What followed is hardly surprising: billions of dollars were spent, and yet casualties from bombs
...more
